Hearing Voices, Living Fully: Living with the Voices in My Head (Meet the Author Session)

Abstract

Hearing Voices, Living Fully: Living with the Voices in My Head chronicles my journey through depression, psychosis, and an unmedicated recovery. I began hearing voices when I was 31, soon after the suicide of my first cousin.... [ view full abstract ]

Hearing Voices, Living Fully: Living with the Voices in My Head chronicles my journey through depression, psychosis, and an unmedicated recovery. I began hearing voices when I was 31, soon after the suicide of my first cousin. Forced to commit myself to a psychiatric hospital, I signed out against medical advice after 10 days. Within a week I had admitted myself to a second hospital, was diagnosed with schizophreniform disorder, and placed on Haldol. Haldol stopped the voices immediately, but the side effects were crippling. Over time, initially under my psychiatrist’s supervision, I tapered the medication and eventually weaned myself from it. I was doing so well that in 1986 my husband and I decided to start a family. But in 1989, when our only son was not quite three, I again spiraled into psychosis and very nearly committed suicide. My responsibility for and to my son kept me from following through.

Over time, thanks to a discipline of self-guided and professional therapy, I learned to challenge my demons and negotiate the conditions that ultimately allowed me to regain control over my mind and life, even while continuing to hear intermittent voices. Many of the techniques I used to re-find myself—argument, negotiation, acceptance when appropriate, and an unwavering determination to live as fully as I could in the real world—are tried and true methods of the Hearing Voices Movement. I attribute my successful, unmedicated “recovery” and the growth I have achieved to the love and support of the communities I have built around myself: family, friends, work, and faith. While finding balance continues to be a struggle, it grows ever easier—informed by vocational satisfaction, life experience, increased self-knowledge and acceptance, and greater understanding of the world, with all its fascinations and terrors.